


and what a privilege to be but the remotest star

by sxldato



Category: Death Note
Genre: Brief Instances of Transphobia, Character Death, Character Study, Denial, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Drug Dealing, Gender Identity, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Loss of Faith, M/M, Murder, Near Death Experiences, Non-Explicit Sex, Prostitution, Recreational Drug Use, Religious Conflict, Religious Guilt, Scars, Self-Hatred, Slow Burn, Slut Shaming, Trans Character, it's real vague and poetic or whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-29
Packaged: 2018-03-25 15:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3814783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxldato/pseuds/sxldato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mello's character arc from the very, very beginning, and almost to the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. she stiffens when praised

**Author's Note:**

  * For [labasu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/labasu/gifts).



> i've been writing for four years and this is my first multi-chapter fic  
> RIP me in fucking pieces  
> does this even count as being a multi-chapter fic? is it long enough to be considered one?? what the fuck is this??? where's the list of criteria did i fit all the criteria NOBODY TELLS ME ANYTHING  
> i'm so tired  
> slightly beta'd-- that goes for this whole fic especially for the last two chapters because i basically wrote those in one sitting lmao i'm dead-- just let me know if there are any glaring mistakes (wrong tense usage, wrong pronouns, things not making any fucking sense, etc)  
> fic title is from a poem by Emily Dickinson called "Part Two: Nature (CIII)"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is from a poem by Ari Banias called "Solve for X"

**Mercury**

She’s small, and she moves like a bullet through the halls. She’s nothing but a flash of golden hair and the lingering clean scent of Johnson & Johnson soap. No one ever gets a good look at her; she’s always going somewhere, going anywhere. No one knows what she’s running from.

He sees her outside his window one day, climbing the highest tree in the courtyard. He’s pretty sure that it’s against the rules to climb so high, and the fact that she’s gotten so far already piques his curiosity. His arms are thin, but he pushes up the glass with all his might and leans out the window. He watches, dumbstruck, as she scales the trunk like a squirrel and swings from branch to branch. She perches precariously on one of them, holding onto the trunk with one hand. She’s covered in scrapes and bruises, but her eyes are blue and bright and she’s got a wide, toothy grin on her face.

“What are you doing?” He calls out. The wind whips through the leaves, blowing her hair against her face, but he can still see the piercing blue in her eyes.

“I’m winning!” The girl shouts back to him. She speaks with an air of obviousness, like he should have known, like what _else_ could she be doing?

He looks down; sure enough, there’s a boy at the bottom of the tree, still struggling to get a good hold on the bark.

He looks back up at her. She’s got sharp features that remind him of the girls he saw when his family stayed in Russia for six months. Her bone-white complexion makes it easy to see the freckles that scatter across the bridge of her nose. He thinks they might look like his own, even though his blend into the copper tone of his skin.

“You’re gonna hurt yourself!” He tells her, and is rewarded with a branch thrown at his face. He never really decides if he deserved that or not.

 

She sets her tray down in front of him in the cafeteria the next day. He screwed up getting the straw into his Capri Sun, so now he’s letting it leak all over the napkin he wasn’t going to use in the first place while he jabs the little buttons on his Gameboy. But when she sits down, he gets distracted. And then he gets frustrated.

“You made me lose my Pokebattle!”

“You were using Bulbasaur, dummy-- you were gonna lose anyways,” she says, taking a bite out of her sandwich.

“That’s so mean. You’re so mean.”

“No, I’m Mello.” She takes a long drink from her juice box. “So you wanna be friends or not, mystery-kid-whose-name-I-don’t-know?”

“I’m Matt—and you threw a stick at my face.”

“I know. But when I climb that tree again, you can come with me and we can throw sticks at _other_ people, _together_.”

Even his nine-year-old brain realizes that’s not much of a bargain, but he also doesn’t have any friends, so it’s more compelling than it should be.

“… Yeah, okay.”

 

They hide in the leaves and blossoms as they take turns throwing acorns and twigs their unsuspecting peers. He almost starts to laugh, but Mello punches his arm to get him to stop, to keep them hidden. It hurts, but the blue of her eyes is too nice for him to care.

**Venus**

She doesn’t kiss Matt on his thirteenth birthday, when they’re camped out under a blanket fort and hitting each other with Red Vines. But she wants to, and she isn’t sure why. Matt’s got braces and wears Axe and he still uses Miniclip, so by all standards, he’s kind of gross. It’s not that she doesn’t think he _isn’t_ gross, because she sees how disgusting he can be—she’s seen him eat pizza off the floor and touch things with fingers covered in Cheetos dust. It’s that, for some reason she doesn’t quite understand, it doesn’t bother her.

He’s sticking faded glow stars to the blankets above them when she asks, “Can I kiss you?”

He stops putting up the stars and is very still for a long time, a Red Vine hanging from his mouth and a look of confusion on his face.

“You can say no.” She isn’t even sure if it means anything, her kissing him. She only knows she wants to, and whether it has any repercussions isn’t really on her mind. But she supposes it’s on Matt’s.

“The answer _isn’t_ no,” Matt says. Leave it to him to be so obscure.

“Then what is it?”

Matt is quiet for a while longer, chewing thoughtfully on his Red Vine and staring at his handiwork of self-stick stars. “It’s no… for right now. I don’t think I’m ready. But in the future, I think I’d want you to.”

Her heart doesn’t stutter or stop beating. There’s nothing wrong with her, nothing he doesn’t want-- he’s just not ready, and that’s fine. She might not be ready, either.

“Maybe I’ll practice before you let me kiss you,” she jokes.

“Oh yeah?” Matt scoffs. “With _who_?”

“Wow, screw you.”

“I thought you only wanted to kiss me!”

“Oh my god.”

 

She kisses him in the summer that follows. He’s sprawled out on her floor, listening to his Walkman that was only two years younger than he was. She’s lying on her bed, sans shirt and her pretty black bra out for the whole world to see, reading a copy of _Boys Like Her_.

There’s a stream of light coming through the window that hits him, and his skin looks like bronze when he’s in the sun.

“Hey.” She swings one of her legs off the bed and nudges him with her foot. “Hey, meathead.”

Matt takes off his headphones. “Don’t call me a meathead. I don’t play sports, I’m not tattooed, and I don’t wear muscle tanks. I’m not a meathead.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” She closes her book and throws it in the general direction of the bedside table. “You wanna kiss now?”

Matt thinks for a solid pulse of time. “Sure.”

He tastes like toothpaste and his hands don’t stray from her waist. His fingers are soft, settling in the curves of her hipbones. They don’t lie down, and she barely touches him; she only keeps the tips of one set of fingers on his cheek, careful not to poke him with her dark nails.

It’s not a long kiss, but it’s also not chaste. It lasts for the kind of moments that feel like they stretch into minutes, and then those minutes stretch into hours. It’s those kind of moments that pass like a drumbeat in your head, the kind you lose count of, the kind that makes you wonder how much time this silence has taken up.

There’s a winged creature in her chest and she isn’t sure if she wants to let it go free.

**Earth**

 

“Remember 1999?”

“Yeah, I was ten.”

“Remember when everyone thought the world was gonna explode?”

“… No.”

Matt is giggling. “Yes you do, come on! What was it called? It had a name and I don’t remember… Y2… Y2000?”

“You’re thinking of Y2K, and it had nothing to do with the world exploding.” Mello looks to be quite done with his bullshit. Matt can always tell when she thinks he’s not making sense, because her eyebrows do a weird thing that Matt can only do if he moves them with his hands.

“It involved the computers, though, right?”

“Yes, it involved computers.” Mello squints at him. “How high are you?”

“I’m not high.”

“You’ve got a blunt in your hand _right now_.”

Matt looks at the joint in between his thumb and pointer finger. “You got me there.”

They’re going back and forth on the swings of a nearby park. It’s only the first week of September, but kids are back in school and the area is deserted. If they were normal, Matt had pointed out, they’d both be in their third year of secondary school by now. That’s weird to think about, so they try to put it out of their heads as much as they can.

“You ever think about trying to be like the rest of them?”  

“No,” Mello says, and it tastes like a lie.

It always feels strange to walk through the wrought iron gates of Wammy’s House. They’re quantum jumpers, she thinks, traveling light-years with just one step. It’s a completely different world past those doors, one neither of them are quite familiar with. They study it in depth during classes, learning cultural customs and languages and prison systems—things that could be helpful if they all turn out how they’re being groomed to be—but it doesn’t feel real. None of it feels real. It’s trying to imitate the authentic, and it’s not even coming close.

“Are you gonna be the next L, Mello?”

“Of course I am.”

“… Do you _want_ to be?”

She wants fame, she wants to win, she wants to be remembered, and she wants to succeed. She’s never thought about being able to do those things outside of L’s legacy. That lens she was given when she first arrived at Wammy’s House had never been put down. She’s always looking through it, and now it’s hard to see her life any other way. “I don’t know what I want.”

“Well, think about it this way.” Matt puts the end of the blunt out on the seat of the swing and sticks it behind his ear. “Where do you think you’d be if you weren’t at Wammy’s House?”

Mello’s bare heels dig into the dirt as she pushes herself back and forth. “Germany. I’d either be dead in the streets or getting money in the sheets.”

Matt snorts and laughs, and Mello smirks. She likes when he laughs. She likes having an audience. “Where’d you be?”

“Me? Oh, man…” Matt looks up at the blue, cloudless sky in deep thought. “Somewhere in Canada, probably? A French part of Canada, like Quebec or whatever. Unless my mom had us stay in Egypt.”

“You think we’d have met?” She asks. “If we hadn’t come here?”

“Definitely,” Matt says, not missing a beat. When Mello raises her eyebrows, he explains, “Some things don’t feel like chance. Like… you and me, this was written down somewhere, this _needed_ to happen. There was a part of me that was in you this whole time, and I don’t think I’d have found it if I didn’t know you. I wouldn’t be me.”

“You’ve smoked _way_ too much pot.”

“No, I’m serious! That’s what it feels like, you know? Do you feel that?”

He’s clearly high as fuck, and he’s spouting total crap, but for some reason she finds herself agreeing with him. “Yeah… yeah, I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Boys Like Her_ is a provocative collection of fiction and photos by Taste This, a queer performance group including Anna Camilleri, Ivan Coyote, Zoe Eakle, and Lyndell Mongomery.


	2. just call me a question mark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’d always had problems with authority.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is from a poem by Aimee Herman called "i/dentity (packed)"

Mars

 

It’s not one big onslaught, it’s not some huge epiphany in the middle of the night, and it doesn’t feel like turning over a completely new leaf. At least, it’s not really like that. It’s just another phase, the same way cicadas shed their skin when they get older. The development of something new doesn’t negate the authenticity of what used to be.

It’s a bunch of little things, all building up to form one irrefutable conclusion.

“We’ll be friends no matter what, right?” Mello asks.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Even if you think I’m totally weird?”

“I already think you’re totally weird.”

Mello huffs and gets up, starting back down the aisle of bookshelves and leaving Matt alone at the line of computers that punctuate one side of the library. It’s clear, though, that Matt is interested—interested enough to punch in AFK on whatever RPG he was playing and to run up to grab Mello by the wrist.

“Wait, come on,” Matt says. “What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t want you making fun of me.”

“I’m not gonna make fun if you’re this serious about it… whatever “it” is. I’ve got some tact, you know that.” His hand is on Mello’s shoulder, one thin thumb rubbing gently over the stark white of Mello’s collarbone. “You can tell me anything.”

The longer Mello waits, the harder it’s gonna be to get the words out. “I’m not—I don’t think…” A deep breath, and then, “I’m not a girl.”

Matt’s eyebrows rise slightly. “Really?”

Mello can only manage a small nod.

“What does that mean, though? Are you a boy?”

“No, it’s…” It’s getting hard to breathe, and Mello’s hands are beginning to shake. “I don’t know, it’s complicated, I’m sorry—“

“Hey, hey.” Matt takes Mello’s hands in his own and holds them tight. “Look at me, alright? I don’t really get this sort of stuff, but whatever you are, whether this is what you’re gonna be for the rest of your life or if it’s some bridge to something else—I don’t care. It doesn’t—Christ, Mello, I can’t believe you’d think this changes anything.”

It’s taking all of Mello’s willpower not to cry. “… You’re serious?”

“Course I am. You’re my best friend and I love you.”

Mello crumbles and they rest their head on Matt’s shoulder, trembling with the effort of holding back tears. Relief sinks into them as Matt wraps his arms around their back and keeps them close.

“Thanks for telling me.”

Mello nods into the crook of Matt’s neck and replies, “Thanks for making me feel like I could.”

 

When they burst into the room, their face is wet and contorted with rage. They say nothing; they only grab a duffel bag from under the bed and start throwing things from their drawers into it. Their labored breathing from repressed sobs is loud, reverberates through their chest.  

“Mello?”

They drop the bag on the floor and rest their head against the dresser. “Stop,” they whisper, “just stop, don’t…”

“Mello, what’s going on?” Matt is up and on his feet, crossing the width of the room in two large strides. He makes the mistake of touching them, and they slam him hard against the wall.

“Don’t!” Their eyes are wild when they look at him, and they’re cold, the same way ice looks when it freezes over shallow waters. It’s a color that slices through him, hurts him to look at for too long.

If he isn’t careful, he could probably drown in it.

Mello is silent for a long time, catching their breath and seeming like they’re trying really hard not to punch him. “He’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think, shithead?” Mello shouts. “L! L’s dead!”

“… Aw, damn.” Matt has never claimed to be good with words.

“L’s dead—“ their voice cracks and his heart shatters because, fuck, that’s gotta be the saddest thing he’s ever heard— “and I’m leaving.”

He can’t think of what to say, can only watch as Mello slings the bag over their shoulder and wipes the tears from their face. He trails behind them down the long spiral staircase, all the way to the front door, and then he finds the words he needs them to hear.

“I’ll come for you,” he says, and it sounds like an empty promise, something that children would pinky-swear on and then forget about the next day. “You need me, and I’ll be there.”

Mello pauses on the threshold and looks over their shoulder at him. They look like they’re trying really hard not to cry, and just barely succeeding. Their eyes are bloodshot and rimmed with red, and that bright, painful blue has become muted. They don’t say anything because they don’t need to.

Just like how they began, they’re nothing more than a flash of golden hair, and then they’re gone.

The door shuts quietly and the sound cracks his skull, echoes through his eardrums.

He’d never figured out what they were running from.

 

Jupiter 

 

It’s not raining, but it’s overcast and windy.

They aren’t wearing any shoes. The asphalt is rough and cold and small stones stick to the soles of their feet. Each step they take makes the bag slung over their shoulder heavier, and by the time they reach the train their legs are ready to give out beneath them.

They’re being stared at. Maybe it’s because they look homeless, or maybe it’s because people are trying to answer the age-old question— “is this thing a boy or a girl?”—and the idea of anyone settling on either of those options has them feeling dizzy.

The rattling of the train car is loud, makes it hard to think. It doesn’t matter; they wouldn’t be able to think in dead silence.

They pull their legs up onto the seat, curling their toes over the edge. They’re all cried out, and all that’s left is shock and anger. Their skin feels stretched taut over their bones, like they’ll tear at the seams and explode at any second.

They don’t know what to do and they don’t know where they’re going. The only goal in their mind when they left had been _away_. They hadn’t cared where; they’d just needed to escape. The system of breeding geniuses like cattle, the pressure that was supposed to turn them into diamonds but only ended up crushing them to dust, the constant need for support from a faceless icon of corrupt justice—it all had needed to go. And if that meant leaving the only person they’d considered a friend, well, that’s a price they had to pay. It will all come out the wash sooner or later, they’re sure of it.

Or that’s what they tell themself to stop themself from going back.

The system had failed them, they’d failed the system, whatever—either way, they need to do this their own way, by their own rules.

They’d always had problems with authority.

 

They don’t have their own bed, but they do spend a lot of time in other people’s. It’s one big lie, a long con, pretending to be something they aren’t. But there are plenty of men who are willing to put their wedding rings on the bedside table for a night. There are plenty of men who crumble when they see a nice pair of breasts on someone whose only condition is for there to be no strings attached.

They use this as an advantage, even though sometimes it hurts and the sight of their own chest makes it hard to breathe. Suburban fathers pay well for their little secret not to be leaked. Businessmen need to keep their reputation. It’s all very hush-hush, which is great because Mello has a reputation of their own to uphold.

The money builds up fast, and soon enough they’re able to hop across the pond and scavenge the streets of New York for new bait. Sucking people off and dealing coke in back alleys isn’t their ideal way to catch Kira, but it’ll all work out in the end. They’ve got a plan; it’s just taking some time, and that’s fine. They can be patient.

The plan isn’t to get to the top without getting their hands dirty. That would be impossible, especially in New York. Sneaking around in the shadows while word spreads is exactly what they want. It draws the attention of people higher up. Mafia members in the city have seen them with the little bags of green and white poking out of their pockets; they know it. They know they’re being talked about—that kid (that’s all they are in the grand scheme of things, just a kid) with the nice hair and the bloody switchblade and the drugs and the cum on their t-shirt. The kid whose individual business is starting to rival the top. The kid who could potentially become a problem soon if they aren’t allied with the best of the best—or the worst of the worst, depending on how one looks at it.

And that’s how they end up on a tacky zebra-print couch in a run-down building, barely seventeen, watching men twice their size bending over the wooden coffee table to snort lines of coke. They sit quietly, looking at the three thick fingers in their hand, nothing but bloodied stumps at the bottom. Someone had called them an “it,” and they hadn’t been there for that shit, so they snapped the man’s wrist and cut off his fingers with one smooth slice of their knife.

The man next to them isn’t touching the coke, but then again, neither are they. It’s not that they think they’re too good for drugs; they’ve just never been interested. They have bigger fish to fry, and they can’t do it on a brain that has the consistency of scrambled eggs.

“What’d you say your name was, kid?” His skin is the same color as Matt’s—bronze, flawless. The lights on the ceiling reflect off his head, making it clear that the baldness is a choice, not caused by age.

“I’m Mello.”

“And I take it you’re not here just to sell my men coke and take a few of their fingers with you.”

“I’m going to catch Kira, and I’m going to do it with you.” There is no ‘want’ or ‘need’ in their sentences. That leaves room for doubt, for the possibility of failure, and they can’t have that.

“What makes you think I’m gonna say yes?” There’s a smirk on his lips, the kind of smirk that already gives Mello their answer, but they play along, answer his questions.

“Because I’ll have you raking in cash like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll be the biggest drug cartel in North America.”

“You know about our competing group.”

“I’ll bring you their leader’s head. Literally.”

He finally looks at them, and his eyes are the same as theirs; they had probably been a beautiful, gentle blue once. “You sound awfully confident for someone who can’t even decide if they’re a boy or a girl.”

“ _You_ sound like you want to lose your package, Rod.”

His laugh is deep and rumbly, and it stirs something inside them. “Here’s the deal, kid,” he says. “You bring me that boss’s head, and we’ll do whatever the fuck you want.”

They grin wide enough to show teeth and get up to make their exit. They tell Rod they’ll be back in a week, so he and his boys should start learning some proper etiquette with trans people before they’re working for one.

 

They’re sitting on that same tacky couch in six days, twirling their knife in their hand, a mob boss’s severed head sitting on the table in front of them. Their winged eyeliner is sharp and dramatic, and they’re wearing pants that look like they’d been painted on, but none of the boys make any comment about either.

Whoever says respect and fear don’t go hand and hand is a goddamned liar.

 

Saturn

 

Matt does not drive in New York City. That’s a promise he made to himself when he first got there at the ripe old age of eighteen. He has no patience for the traffic, for the incessant string of car honks, for the infinite number of intersections and stoplights. He’s third for a reason; he simply does not have the capacity to put up with that.

But there comes a day when he gets a voicemail from a blocked number. The person on the other end is barely loud enough to be heard, and the words “I’m going to die, hack the GPS in my phone and come get me” pass through the receiver in a mess of static. Matt’s rule is instantly forgotten as he throws himself into his car and prepares himself for the hundreds of illegal things he’s about to do on the road.

If he keeps this up, he thinks—doing things for Mello just because they’re Mello, and because he’s always loved them in some way or another—he might get himself killed.

He swerves through an intersection and decides it’ll be worth it.

 

He doesn’t even stop to assess the damage of their burns, doesn’t even think, just scoops them up in his arms—god, when did they get so thin?— and makes his way back out of the wreckage. He can hear them groaning, whimpering, and he can’t even bring himself to be mad at them for never calling in the past four years.

There’s so much blood. It drips down their skin, smears all over the upholstery of the backseat where they’re sprawled out. He thinks the incoherent strings of words they’re muttering under their breath are prayers, but he doesn’t ask.

 

He’s stopped at the doors when they take them into ICU. Doctors say he can’t go, not unless he’s their kin, and he wants to scream that _yes_ , he fucking counts, he’s the closest fucking thing that Mello has ever had.

He’s pretty sure that’ll get him escorted out of the building, so he doesn’t do that. Instead, he sits in the waiting room, watching numbly as people come and go. The ticking of the second hand on the clock on the wall echoes through his skull, and he wonders if Mello’s heart is still beating, if he got there in time or if this was all for nothing.

He doesn’t know how to pray. He wishes Mello had taught him how.

 

They wake to the familiar sound of thumbs pushing worn-down buttons, eliciting small beeps and blips.

“Is that a fucking _Tamagotchi_ ” are the first words they can push out of their mouth, and the look of relief on Matt’s face when he hears them speak would almost be laughable if they hadn’t been so afraid they would die, too.

He tastes like smoke and flat Pepsi, and they think they might taste like blood, but Matt doesn’t seem to care.

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,” they say as Matt sits back, taking their hand and pressing his lips to their bruised knuckles. “Cause I’ve been such an asshole…”

“Well, you’re not wrong. You’ve been really shitty—but that doesn’t mean I was gonna let you die.”

“You know why I did it, don’t you? You gotta understand.” The sedatives are making it hard to speak clearly, and their sentences are slurred together. It’s hard to keep their eyes open.

“No, actually, I _don’t_ fucking know why you wouldn’t answer your phone for four years until you needed me to haul your ass to the hospital,” Matt snaps. “Which I was happy to do, because a dead Mello is worse than a distant Mello, but _seriously?_ You couldn’t have written me? Couldn’t have even let me know you were okay? Why’d you cut ties with me?”

The barely contained anger in his voice has guilt turning their stomach. It’s hard to breathe around regret. “Matt, I’m sorry—“

“I don’t care if you’re sorry. Just tell me why you did it.” His brows are furrowed and his eyes are watery, bloodshot. “You owe me that.”

They haven’t cried in half a decade, and they don’t like how it feels. “You’re the only person who could’ve changed my mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will try to have chapter three up as soon as possible! it's gonna be around 1.5k, so hopefully i'll have it up within a week? yea


	3. he still stands in spite of what his scars say

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I talked to God today.”  
> “… And how’d that go?”  
> “He wouldn’t answer me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is from Some Unholy War by Amy Winehouse  
> this chapter kicked my ass rip me

_Uranus_

 

There’s a loud knock on his door, and before he can get up to answer it, it swings open; Mello’s in the doorway, crouched low with a knapsack swung over his good shoulder and a lock picker in his hand.

“You couldn’t have waited for me to get up?”

Mello offers a shrug and stands, stepping soundlessly into Matt’s apartment.

“You need a place to stay,” Matt guesses.

“I’ve been hiding out in a woman’s bathroom for two weeks—don’t give me that look,” Mello adds when Matt’s eyebrows shoot up. “It’s not like that.”

“Yeah, _sure_ , man. Whatever you say.”

Mello lingers, seeming oddly unsure. “Can I crash here? I know it’s asking for a lot, but I can sleep on the couch, or on the floor—“

“Or you could sleep in my bed,” Matt offers.

Mello is speechless.

 

He’s sitting on the kitchen counter in his underwear, running an alcohol covered cotton ball over the skin on his thigh. He’s got a syringe in his other hand.

“Don’t you dare do drugs in my kitchen,” Matt calls over from the couch, making no real effort to get up and do something about it. There’s a cigarette in his mouth, but he had the decency to go light it out on the balcony. Even the small flame from the lighter tightens Mello’s chest.

“It’s testosterone, you shit,” Mello says, punctuating the end of his sentence by stabbing the needle into his thigh and pushing down the plunger.

“That’s the manly-man chemical, yeah?”

“By a social norm standpoint, yes—why do you only have Hello Kitty Band-Aids?”

“Because I’m not the social norm of a manly-man, that’s why. And they’re cute.”

He sticks one over the little dot of blood and hops off the counter, joining Matt in front of the small television balanced on top of a beer carrier.

“I thought you said you’d only be a drinker of ‘classy-ass wine,’” he says. He keeps closing his right eye and holding his left open, hoping that maybe his sight would come back if he tried hard enough.

“And I thought you’d sooner die than whore yourself out to New York’s underworld,” Matt replies. “But I guess you can never know everything about a person.”

The ease at which he says it and the coolness in his tone that makes it clear that he meant it to hurt, and it’s like being slapped with a frying pan.

“How many times have you rehearsed that one?” Mello asks, ignoring the tension building in his shoulders, the anger burning in his lungs.

“How many dicks did you put in your mouth?”

He smacks the controller out of Matt’s hand and yanks the cigarette from his mouth. Before he can stop himself, before he can take a breath and _think_ , his fist is in Matt’s hair and pulling back, hard. The yelp he gets from Matt is oddly satisfying.

“I lost count at the fifteenth,” he hisses, taking Matt’s chin in his other hand. “Now you fucking listen to me. I did what I had to do. I’ve taken it up the ass, I’ve destroyed my gag reflex, and I’ve swallowed cum that tasted like armpit. And what the ever-loving _fuck_ did I get in return?”

“… I feel like that’s a rhetorical question--”

“I got half my face blown up, and I’m blind in one eye. Does _any_ part of you think that’s fair?”

Matt stays silent, and Mello releases his hold on him. “I deserve respect. I’ve earned it.”

“I didn’t mean—“

“Yes, you did.” Mello can’t even look at him. “You think I sold myself out. You think I’m dirt because I gave myself to people in order to survive.”

“I think you were lying to yourself, Mello.” Matt’s racecar in his game had driven off the road and into the void of space, and Matt turned it off by stretching his leg out and nudging one of the buttons on the television. “You made yourself out to be a girl, and you’re not. Those guys used you because they thought you were a girl, and you’re not. And I hate that you did that. I hate that you hurt yourself that way.”

“What I did to scrape by when I was sixteen is none of your concern,” Mello says through a clenched jaw. “And you have no right to shame me for it.”

“I’m not—Jesus Christ, I’m not shaming you! Can you just—“ Matt rakes a hand through his hair and puts his face in his hands. “Can you _please_ , for a minute, just stop acting like you didn’t majorly fuck up your life? Can you sit here, with me, and reflect on the choices you’ve made, and acknowledge you screwed up?”

“I didn’t screw up.”

“Mello, I love you with all of my pathetic little heart, but prostituting yourself and selling crack in back alleys was not the only option you had.”

He’s heavy, so heavy, and the couch is going to cave in and swallow him up, suffocate him. There’s a reason he doesn’t think about what he did, and it’s because it fills him with so much humiliation that his bones want to shatter from the pressure.

“I’ll talk when I’m ready,” he says, curling his hands into fists so Matt can’t see how badly they’re starting to tremble.

Matt’s expression softens. “Okay, yeah. I’ll—I’ll be here.”

 

It’s a Sunday morning when Mello quietly comes through the front door. He’s still got his rosary clutched in one hand from church services, and he looks worn, shaken.

Matt is sitting at the kitchen table, trying to drink the tar that he was trying to pass off as coffee. “You alright?”

“I didn’t just whore myself out, Matt. That wasn’t the worst thing I did.”

It’s not even noon yet and he’s not wearing pants; he’s not prepared for this at all. “Okay, uh—“ _Let me put something on over my Pac-Man boxers before you lose your shit—_ “do you want to talk about it?”

His breath is uneven and his lips are contorted into a deep, distraught frown.

“Mello?”

“I’ve killed people.”

There is a stunned silence between the two of them for a long time. Matt gets up slowly and goes to pour his coffee down the sink. “Well, you were in the mafia, so I guess I kind of figured.”

“I talked to God today.”

He doesn’t want to play into the breakdown that Mello is clearly about to have, but he doesn’t see any other choice than to bite. “… And how’d that go?”

When Mello finally looks up at him, there’s a tear dripping from his clouded left eye. He looks hurt, like he’d been betrayed by a close friend. “He wouldn’t answer me.”

_Neptune_

 

He runs on triple red-eyes and anxiety. His nails are bitten down to the quick, and he scratches at the scar tissue on his shoulder. It comes away in flakes of dead skin and blood on his fingertips.

He wears jackets and sunglasses when he goes out. He hides because he doesn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, doesn’t want to make himself uncomfortable. He doesn’t like looking at himself anymore-- rebuilding a confident front isn’t easy when half his face is marred with scar tissue.

The church pews are cold in the winter, especially in the back, but that’s where he sits. He’s too scared to get any closer. He rests his head against the pew in front of him, clasping his hands so hard his knuckles have gone white. Thoughts run through his head, thoughts that he doesn’t want God to see.

He thinks how similar the grip of his hands looks to how one might wrap them around someone’s throat. He thinks how a cross had dangled from his wrist while he fired a bullet into someone’s head. He thinks if it had been him dragging that damn cross to Golgotha, he would have broken it up and carried it under his arm. He would have beaten those pieces over the Romans heads, and then he would have hauled ass back to Nazareth.

But, then again, he’s no Christ. Other people have died for _his_ sins.

He cries in the confessional when the priest calls him “son” because his mother and father never got the chance to. He cries when the priest says that God loves him because it’s a lie.

God does not love him. He doubts if God ever did.

 

“Are you gonna come with me to the Laundromat down the street today?” Matt asks him even though he’s buried under a blanket, only a few blond hairs peaking through. “There’s not a lot of people around on Friday nights, you know—there’s just this old lady that throws her underwear at you sometimes, but she’s cool.”

“I’ll scare her.”

“With what, your _face?_ ”

“Yes.”

Matt drops the bag of laundry on the floor and plops down on the other end of the couch. “You used to go out with no problem, and that was still when you were on all that medication for the pain and stuff. If anything, it should be getting better.”

“Sorry I’m such a disappointment, then.”

“I swear to fuck, Mello, you need to get out of this slump before I knock you out of it.”

Mello throws the blanket down to his torso and glares at Matt. “Is that what you’d call it? A slump?”

“Maybe that’s oversimplifying it.”

“I lost L, I lost God—I don’t have anybody to prove myself to. I’m not fighting for anyone anymore.”

Matt takes his goggles off his eyes, letting them hang around his neck. He’s still wearing his driving gloves—Mello’s driving gloves. He’s always taking Mello’s clothes, and Mello doesn’t care because Matt’s given him a roof over his head and somewhere reasonably warm to sleep at night. Matt paid for his time in the hospital, for his codeine and Oxycontin and even his fucking Advil, and Mello knows that there is nothing in this world that he could offer to repay this colossal debt.

“Why not fight for you?”

Matt’s voice is so quiet compared to the roaring in his ears that he almost doesn’t catch it. “What?”

“Why don’t you fight for yourself?” Matt says it like it’s obvious, like he can’t believe Mello had missed it. “Stop looking for somebody to validate you. You can validate yourself. Do things for you, not for the praise of someone else.”

The thought of doing things for the sake of doing them and not for some greater purpose or some faceless higher power is foreign and frightening, and Mello isn’t sure that it’s wired in him to do something like that. That programming had been ripped out of him years ago. He was always at the will of someone bigger and better, even when he was on top. He couldn’t live any other way.

“I’ve never done something for me.”

“How about you come do some laundry, then?” Matt is touching his knee, and Mello doesn’t have the instinct to pull back. “It’s right down the street, and it would be a good baby step. You’d be helping yourself.”

“Are you sure I wouldn’t just be helping _you_ do laundry?” Mello asks, and he’s smiling on the outside, which he thinks counts as being happy.

“Well, you know, that too, but—“

“Let me grab my jacket and we can go.”

 

The woman’s name is Grace and her husband died in World War Two. At least, that’s what Mello thinks. It’s been a long time since he’s heard someone speaking Russian. He lets her think he was in a war, too, because it’s not completely a lie and it’s better than saying he blew up a building.

She says he’s beautiful for a man, that the blue in his eyes matched her husband’s when he was young, and he needs to step outside while Matt pours in the detergent because even a senile grandmother sees him for who he is.

When he goes back inside, he tells Matt he’s not crying, that it’s just from the rain.


	4. the eternal end shall find us one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They both kind of know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pluto is not technically a planet anymore so i guess this could be considered an epilogue but i don't know. treat this however you want it  
> chapter title is from a poem "The Call" by Rupert Brooke and yes i have used this poem to title another death note fanfic i wrote but you know what it's. it's fine it's fine no one cARES IT'S FINE AND I AM FINISHED WITH THIS FIC AND I'M GONNA BE HONEST I'M A LITTLE DEAD INSIDE BUT FUKC IT

_Pluto_

 

“You good to go tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’m good to go tomorrow.” Matt is fiddling with his chopsticks. “But do you even know how to ride a motorcycle?”

“Do you hear yourself when you speak?”

“Sometimes.”

“Just eat your octopus so we can go.”

“Do you see this? Do you see—there are still _suction cups_ —“

“First of all, you’re going to get us kicked out for playing with your food. Secondly, octopus isn’t even kosher, so what the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m a reform Jew. We don’t deal with kosher shit.”

Mello leans back against the wall of the booth and sucks down more Coke through his straw. “I swear I will never understand your religion.”

“At least we have good food. What do you guys have? Those little slivers of Jesus meat?”

Mello almost chokes on his drink. “They’re called _communion wafers_.”

“Merely a euphemism.”

Mello smirks a little into his glass and lets the silence hang between them. It’s not a comfortable silence, not like it usually is. It weighs on his shoulders and makes him want to squirm. Matt shouldn’t have to be doing this, he keeps telling himself he should find a way where Matt doesn’t have to be involved, but Matt had offered and it isn’t looking like he’d back down if Mello comes up with something else on the fly. That’s just the kind of person he is, and Mello loves him and hates him for it.

“Do me a favor and keep your goggles on, alright?” He’s quiet compared to the din of the restaurant.

“Yeah, definitely. Same with your helmet.”

Mello nods, not looking at him, the sense of things soon coming to a close pressing him down.

“Once you fire that smokescreen, you keep driving,” Mello says. “If they surround you, you barrel on through. You will trash the hell out of that car if it means you get out of there safe.” It’s a demand more than it is a request, and Matt agrees without protest.

“You too, you know? I mean, there’s not much protection with a motorcycle, but you can weave around cars and shit—“

“I know. I’ll try my best.”

Matt falters, and after more than ten years, Mello doesn’t even have to see his face to know that his brow is furrowed and his eyes look darker with worry. “That doesn’t sound like a confident answer.”

“That’s because it’s not.”

 

Their bodies blend together between the sheets. Mello says that he hasn’t had sex since he was seventeen, and Matt says he’ll make it good, that he’ll take care of him. Mello doesn’t trust people; it comes with the job, it’s wired in his DNA, and he’d be dead five times over if he trusted anyone. But he trusts Matt, just like he always has.

He can’t stop thinking about that night under the blankets, with the self-stick stars and the Red Vines and how he’d been so young, such a bright-eyed girl. He can’t stop wondering how he got here, how they both got here.

He digs his fingers into Matt’s back out of fear that he’ll vanish, raking angry marks down his spine. His hands are in his hair, holding tight at the naturally dark roots that ebb out into red.

Matt smells like cigarette smoke and it feels like home when he laces their fingers together against the pillows. He’s telling him he’s beautiful as he kisses the scar tissue on his chest, and Mello doesn’t cry when Matt says the three words that had never been said to him before, the same words he’d never been able to say. He isn’t crying, except there’s no excuse of it being nothing but the rain.

As they lie together, listening to the sounds of the city outside the window while they wait for sleep, Mello can almost swear that there’s one lone self-stick star on the ceiling that hadn’t been there before.

 

There are rushed last words as they part ways. They release their hands only when they have to. There are kisses and “I love you”s that morph into laughter and tears because deep down, they both kind of know.

 

Matt stays on the main boulevard and Mello pulls off onto a side road, and there are church bells going off in the distance when Matt fires the first smokescreen.


End file.
